This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

The plight of violists

In his symphonic bible, &quot;The Young Lutheran's Guide to the Orchestra,&quot; Garrison Keillor has some succinct advice for would-be viola players: &quot;Don't be part of this crowd.

Teng Li, principal violist with the TSO, led a good-natured walkout of the viola players when guest conductor Bramwell Tovey told a joke at their expense. (March 4, 2009) (KEITH BEATY / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

By Kenneth KiddFeature Writer

Sat., March 7, 2009

In his symphonic bible, "The Young Lutheran's Guide to the Orchestra," Garrison Keillor has some succinct advice for would-be viola players: "Don't be part of this crowd.

"I know violists and they are fine people until, late at light, they start drinking a few bottles of cheap red wine and roasting chickens over a pit in a vacant lot and talk about going to Yucatan with a woman named Rita."

Now, there are at least two things to note about this passage. The first is that violists get off rather lightly compared with most other musicians, not least the first violins, whom Keillor calls "the biggest collection of gold-plated narcissists ever gathered on one stage." (For the record, only percussion and the harp are saintly enough for a young Lutheran.)

The second thing is that Keillor makes violists sound like charmingly rebellious rogues, the Tom Waits section of the orchestra. What violist, deep down, wouldn't appreciate that?

It's certainly better than enduring yet another viola joke.

Article Continued Below

Perhaps you've heard one, mostly about how violists (allegedly) never play in tune or in unison. Sample: "How is lightning like a violist's fingers? Neither one strikes in the same place twice."

Or this one, which, curiously, is funnier in German since the rhyme gets lost in translation: "Was Sind die drei Lagen auf der. Bratsche? Erste Lage, Notlage, und Niederlage." (What are the three positions on the viola? First position, emergency and defeat.)

You get the picture. But why pick on violists? Why do some people go to the trouble of taking a perfectly good joke about, say, lawyers, and converting it into a viola joke? What is it about an ancient instrument played by the likes of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven that has attracted such breezy abuse for so long?

There's a break in rehearsal and nearly the entire viola section of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra is huddled in the bowels of Roy Thomson Hall, there to ponder the Dangerfield plight of violas and those who play them.

Voices dart out in quick succession:

"The viola is acoustically imperfect."

"It's actually harder to play."

"There's more camaraderie."

"We all have cello envy."

"It's easier to get a job."

And finally, "Like Newfoundlanders, we can laugh at ourselves."

For those who haven't spent a lot of time as orchestra rats, such talk might seem a little odd, given that violas look like violins and are played in pretty much the same fashion. So you'd be forgiven for thinking this was merely the narcissism of small differences.

Except that it's not. Culture has a way of following form and function.

Everyone knows about the violin. Everyone. The great virtuoso instrument. The acoustically perfect, hourglass figure, with a main body that for centuries has measured 14 inches. That massive repertoire of grand concertos.

Well, violas, aren't like that. They're a lot bigger, for one, with bodies ranging up to 17 inches or more, which is about as big as they can get before you have to start playing them like cellos instead. (From the Italian, violin is the diminutive of viola.) Nor is the shape quite so uniform. Makers of instruments have tried all manner of innovations to try to highlight this or that part of the viola sound.

There are some exquisite pieces of music for viola – the 6th Brandenburg Concerto by Bach, for instance, or Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola. Harold en Italie, by Berlioz, is pretty well known. Both Brahms and Schumann wrote sublime works for the viola, which also has a big role in one of Elgar's Enigma Variations, "Ysobel."

But after that, the canon starts retreating into the more obscure and modern, not the sort of stuff orchestras build entire seasons around. Violin and cello virtuosi have been on the planet for centuries, but no one would have applied that sobriquet to a violist until Lionel Tertis and then William Primrose happened along (barely and not quite) 100 years ago.

It has to do with the traditional role violas have played, and some of the baggage that's grown up around them. Violas are tuned a perfect fifth lower than the violin, meaning they share three strings with a violin (A, D, G) while adding a fourth, still lower string, C. That puts violas into the (lower) alto clef, rather than treble.

In almost any sort of ensemble, violists end up playing harmony, not melody. Even in chamber music, there are scarcely any viola solos, and mostly brief ones at that.

"We don't get a chance to shine that much," says Teng Li, principal violist with the TSO. "We're harmony. We know how to give. A lot of violists really have that personality, to be generous."

And what do they get in return?

Lines like this from English composer Cecil Forsyth, whose much-reprinted 1914 manual, Orchestration, proclaims most violists "too wicked or senile to play the violin." The only part of the viola he seems to like is that bottom C string, sombre, austere and whose "mere sound, even in the simplest phrases, is sufficient to conjure up the image of Tragedy."

There is, alas, one unavoidable fact about the viola: You'll never hear 8-year olds pleading with their parents to let them learn to play it.

Almost no one starts out on the viola, and that would include yours truly, who happens to hail from a long line of professional violinists.

Here's how it happened:

Violinist daughter is enrolled in junior orchestra. After two rehearsals, daughter balks at going back. Father says he's already paid fees; he'll go to orchestra and daughter can sit outside, do homework.

Father offers to help out with second or third violins. Helpfully mentions viola kicking around family. Conductor, himself great violist, desperately needs viola player.

Daughter rejoins orchestra. Father has new instrument.

After which, a gold-plated violinist in the family just has to say – and this with a kind of cheery, hard-wired condescension: "It's easier, but they do have their moments."

Talk to any violist, and you'll hear broadly similar tales. We all started out on violin, only to leave ourselves strangely vulnerable to slights when we switch to or add the viola.

But oh, what a happy transition it can be. Stanley Soloman, who was principal violist at the TSO for decades, remembers how orchestras during World War II would try to spread the work out among as many underemployed musicians as possible.

Playing violin, Soloman could only get so many gigs. But adding the viola opened up a whole range of additional jobs, since violists — like goalies in pickup hockey – are almost always in short supply.

"I picked up a viola from a friend of mine one day and I can tell you, it's as if I discovered religion," says Soloman. "I felt so much at home."

Or consider Pinchas Zukerman, music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, who as a teenager in the mid-1960s was studying violin with the great Josef Gingold at the Meadowmount summer school in upstate New York.

Gingold had an idea.

"One day he said to me, `Pinky, come on, play the viola.'

So I said, `Mr. Gingold, first of all I don't have one.'

"`I'll give you one.'

"`I can't read the clef.'

"`I'll show you.'"

Within a few days, Zukerman was playing viola in string quartets and had fallen in love with the viola's lush sound. There's just something about the overtones on the bottom strings of a viola and how, in Zukerman's words, "you can draw the bow in a way that creates this fabulous, velvety dark sound."

It doesn't take much to get him humming and singing. "When you get to the bottom of something like a Schumann, that extraordinary fourth movement of the Marchenbilder in pianissimo, that's a colour that absolutely can only be done on the viola."

Played well, violas have this worldly, knowing sound, even darkly ironic at times. And the greater distances between positions on the finger board means that, in some ways, you can be more expressive than on a violin.

"I say that's why I picked up the viola, so I can be more expressive," says Zukerman. "And they look at me like I'm out of my mind."

"They" no doubt being those who've heard (and believed) too many viola jokes.

"I don't know who started all this stuff," says Zukerman. "They should all try and play it. I think they'd stop joking."

Conductor and pianist Bramwell Tovey, now with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, has a certain fondness for viola jokes, which he doesn't restrict to the privacy of his dressing room. He tells them everywhere, and that includes concert halls before an audience.

"People think the viola is a sad and desolate instrument," Tovey volunteers over the phone. "But it isn't sad. It's just desolate."

As a public speaker, Tovey says, wit is essential if you're going to hold anyone's attention. "It's just one of those instruments that's easy to poke fun at." This, despite it also being "so beautiful, Mozart's favourite instrument to play."

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com